advent

In a Nazi prison in 1945, shortly before he was in hanged as a traitor for opposition of Hitler, Jesuit priest Father Alfred Delp penned these words.

There is perhaps nothing we modern people need more than to be genuinely shaken up. Where life is firm we need to sense its firmness; and where it is unstable and has no basis, no foundation, we need to know this too and endure it.

We may ask why God has sent us into this time, why he has sent a whirlwind over the earth, why he keeps us in this chaos, where all appears hopeless and dark and why there seems to be no end to this in sight.... Perhaps we were living on earth in an utterly false and counterfeit security... We have stood on this earth in false pathos, in false security; in our spiritual insanity we really believed we could, with the power of our own hand and arm, bring the stars down from heaven and kindle flames of eternity in the world. We believed that with our own forces we could avert the dangers and banish the night, switch off and halt the internal quaking of the universe. We believed we could harness everything and fit it into a final order that would stand.

Here is the message of Advent: faced with him who is the Last, the world will begin to shake... The Advent message comes out of an encounter of man with the absolute, the final, the gospel. The fact that then the Son of man shall come is more than a historic prophesy; it is also a decree, that God's coming and the shaking up of humanity are somehow connected.
from Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas, emphasis added

Perhaps it was purplish-black clouds glowing behind the full moon, garish and beautiful all at once. Hazy as an impressionist painting. Perhaps, the rich choral arrangement of Still, Still, Still echoing in my head as I drove home from my friends' Christmas concert. At this time of year, all the world seems to teeter between madness and peace. Everything seems pregnant with immediacy... delicate and solid all at once, "the absolute, the final" wrapped in less than ten pounds of soft skin and and squinty eyes.